Sanya
Kantarovsky

Sanya Kantarovsky, born in Moscow in 1982, emigrated to New York at the age of 10; he still lives and works there. His visual art, primarily painting, with forays into animated film, nevertheless carries echoes of his Soviet childhood, especially his literary and cinematic culture, which blend naturally with his interest in “the potential for embarrassment inherent to the overwrought archetype” and his “fear of mortality,” which is both “banal [and] deep-seated.” This lingering sense of worry is present in many of his works, which articulate elements of reality—human figures, animals, plants, architectural fragments—and references to a broader visual culture, frequently evoking the compositions and formal languages of the Russian and French avant-gardes, among others. The scenes thus depicted stretch the boundaries of figuration beyond the specificities of moments and places to achieve a level of indefiniteness traditionally associated with abstraction.